iPhone X official with edge-to-edge display, Face ID, and No Home Button

Probably most hyped smartphone of the year and most leaked, the special 10th anniversary edition – the iPhone X. Be cleared here – you will pronounce it as iPhone 10. Yes, you may wonder about the missing iPhone 9 as the other announcements were the sequential successors – iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.

This special flagship phone with edge-to-edge display has left the long standing physical home-button. It’s all the screen, from one corner to the other, from one edge to the other. But it’s exactly what we have seen in the leaks before.

New iPhone X is powered by the Apple A11 bionic chipset with a hexa-core processor. It evolves the two-tier CPU design – with two powerful cores and four energy-efficient cores. The chip has the first ever Apple designed GPU too, making it the almost entirely in-house design.

First Ever OLED Display on iPhone

Apple has used the AMOLED display on its Apple Watch before, but it’s the first time ever, it is used on an iPhone. iPhone X features a 5.8-inch OLED display with increased resolution, for what they call it the Super Retina Display.

It’s still below the Quad HD displays on Android flagships today, but it’s the sharpest display ever on an iPhone. With the pixel density of 458ppi, the X serves with the resolution of 2436 x 1125 pixels.

X’s display also supports the 3D Touch interface. This is an HDR display and supports HDR10 content with high dynamic range and Dolby Vision. In addition it has surprisingly a million-to-one contrast ratio (1,000,000:1) and 625 nits maximum brightness.

A wider cutout from the display up at the top hosts a bunch of useful things inside. Your guess is right – the earpiece, a selfie camera and bunch of common sensors. But there is more important sensors working in there for the new security feature – Face ID. It replaces the Touch ID (the fingerprint scanner is not used in the iPhone X).

Face ID

There is a flood illuminator (to make it work in dark) and a dot projector that paints 30,000 points on your face. Apple claims that this Face ID system is more secure with 1,000,000:1 failure ratio than the Touch ID with only 50,000:1. Before any tester does that, Apple already has warned that identical twins might fool this Face ID system.

Any app that has worked with the Touch ID previously, they will work with the Face ID on iPhone X – e.g. Apple Pay. To demonstrate how much secure Face ID is than the bunch of other brands’ iris or facial recognition which have been fooled, Apple used 3D printed masks of the authenticated individuals which failed. It’s important to unlock the phone, an authenticated person has to “pay attention” to the phone.

User Experience and Features

While the phone doesn’t have any home button which have been used to with, it supports different gestures to perform user operations. When the phone is asleep, you can tap on the screen to wake and then swipe up to unlock. When then the phone screen is unlocked, the swipe-up gesture from the bottom edge is used to get away from an app and go back to home screen. To go to recent apps or multitasking UI, use the same swipe-up gesture but hold-on to initiate the multitasking view.

So, with all those new swipe-up gestures from the bottom edge, Control Center has to be moved to top. You can swipe down from the top edge to bring it on.

Dual Camera

iPhone X features 12MP dual camera on the back which is now the first mobile camera to shoot 2160p 4K video at 60fps. The highest frame rate for 1080p video is also doubled to whopping 240 frames per second for smooth slo-mo video recording. While the main wide-angle camera features f/1.8 lens aperture, the telephoto is limited to f/2.4. Both cameras on the back have optical image stabilization with the quad-LED flash that supports slow sync.

Augmented Reality

The cameras on iPhone X are custom tuned for the ultimate AR experience. Each camera is individually calibrated, with new gyroscopes and accelerometers for accurate motion tracking. The A11 Bionic CPU handles world tracking, scene recognition and the GPU enables incredible graphics at 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation.

iOS developers can also take advantage of the TrueDepth camera and the rear cameras with ARKit to create games and apps offering immersive and fluid experiences.

Animoji Brings Emoji to Life

Working with A11 Bionic, the TrueDepth camera captures and analyzes over 50 different facial muscle movements, then animates those expressions in a dozen different Animoji, including a panda, unicorn and robot. Available as an iMessage app pre-installed on iPhone X, customers can record and send Animoji messages with their voice that can smile, frown and more.

Using the TrueDepth camera, iPhone X brings emoji to life in a fun new way with Animoji.

AirPower – Wireless Charging

iPhone X is the first phone from Apple with wireless charging. AirPower is what Apple calls its wireless charging system and it uses the popular Qi standard. It can charge the iPhone X, an Apple Watch and the AirPod case simultaneously. What’s more interesting is, that you can see the battery charge level of each device on the iPhone X’s screen. The AirPower will be available next year.

It’s worth mentioning here that iPhone X’s battery lasts 2 hours more than the iPhone 7 battery. It also has fast-charging support. The iPhone X can reach 50% of charge in 30 minutes with a compatible fast charger.

iPhone X – Price and Availability

iPhone X comes in two colors – Silver and Space Gray as well as in two storage options – 64GB and 256GB, cost $999 and $1149 respectively. Apple will open pre-orders on October 27th and shipping will begin from November 3rd.

Not sure, whether this expensive iPhone will be announced in Pakistan. But if launched, expect the price to go about PKR 130,000/- for 64GB and PKR 150,000/- for 256GB. Consider the difference from previous year’s launches. Also read how the pricing of iPhone 8 and 8 Plus was estimated here.